The Alchemy of the Rewrite

When I’m finished doing this focused freewriting, I read it over and separate the dead from the living. The dead stuff—babble, off-point notions, wrong-headed thinking—I delete or save to other documents for use in a future project (Chapter 25). The living stuff—on-point ideas, interesting turns of phrase, experiments that could stand further pursu

the essence of the process is revision.

A good short story is, among other things, a highly organised system. Its parts feel in connection with one another. There’s very little waste or randomness. Many decisions have been made along the way, by different means, some conscious, some not. It feels fraught with intention, full of direction. It doesn’t necessarily know what it is, but it w

At this point, I want a clear picture of what I have in my master document and what I still might need to add. To get this picture, I take a pad and pen and comb through my onscreen work. For each chunk of prose I read, I sum it up on the pad in a sentence.

Once you’ve said what you have to say, strip away all the language that’s dead, blue, or insane, leaving the stuff that works. Rearrange those chunks in an order that makes sense to you. Don’t worry if you can’t articulate why you arranged them that way. Collage is more creation by gut than creation by logic.

Finally, it’s time to pull together the material I’ve gathered and create an outline (an Archipelago of Ideas) for the project. My goal is to end up not just with a loose collection of ideas. It is to formulate a logical progression of steps that make it clear what I should do next.